7 March, 12.00pm – Power Seminar with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

The Painter's Touch: Materiality and Meaning

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University. During Professor Lajer-Burcharth’s visit to Sydney as a part of the Keir Lectures on Art Series she will also be presenting a lunchtime seminar for students and other interested attendees.

ABOUT THE SEMINAR

What can be gained from considering a painting not only as an image but also a material object? How does the painter’s own experience of the process of making matter for our understanding of both the painting and its maker? Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s long awaited new book, The Painter’s Touch addresses these questions to offer a radical reinterpretation of three paradigmatic French painters of the eighteenth century. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth provides close readings of the works of François Boucher, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, entirely recasting our understanding of these painters’ practice.

In this seminar Professor Lajer-Burcharth will discuss the central themes of The Painter’s Touch, focused on the question of the relation between materiality and meaning in the context of the Enlightenment.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University. Specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art, she has also written extensively on contemporary art, including, among others, the artists such as Janine Antoni, Gary Hill, Mona Hatoum, Mary Kelly, Pipilotti Rist, Sam Taylor-Wood, Amy Sillman, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Her books include Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press, 1999), Chardin Material (Sternberg Press, 2011), Interiors and Interiority, (with Beate Söntgen, De Gruyter, 2015); Painting Beyond Itself: A Medium in the Post-Medium Condition (with Isabelle Graw, Sternberg Press, 2016), and The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her most recent research and writing has been focused on drawing as an act, a medium and an object. She has recently curated an exhibition Drawing: The Invention of the Modern Medium at Harvard Art Museum and co-edited its catalogue (with Elizabeth M. Rudy, 2017)